WHAT IS THE SECRET LIFE OF CITIES AND BEES?
Cities, like bee colonies, act as living organisms whose behavior evolves from many individual interactions. Computer simulations of artificial societies have shown that complex social structures – from opinion clusters to hierarchies – automatically emerge from these interactions. For example, if individuals in a simulation prefer similar neighbors, residential segregation will arise, a phenomenon observed in Manchester, England c.1850. This city, which grew explosively with no government, self-organized into a neighborhood structure that hid the factories and working classes from view. Understanding our cities, from New York to SimCity and Second Life, will require understanding how street-level dynamics affect the whole.
